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Friday, July 29, 2011

Inter-not-operability

The more we talk about it, the less of it there is on our projects.

Meaningful interoperability.

I note that the level of success of how any project’s parties interoperate is shaped by many forces, the medium used for communication, I highlight as important.

Glance back thirty years:

The medium was the drawing – originated as a transparency, a technical document on a sheet of tracing-paper.

‘What you see was what you got’; If you were to develop your own information on the basis of the particular drawing, you’d trace over. You might check the integrity of information symbolised, however any assumption you’d make on the time needed to repurpose the incoming data for your own information would be reasonably accurate.

I.e. the time for a structural drawing to be prepared from an architectural one was not affected by the type of pen (Rotring, Steadler?) the original author had used.

Forward 10 years:

A Flatcad drawing output would be very similar to the hand drawn one, apart from the fact that some electronic data was likely to be exchanged with it.

Here comes the variability: no longer could you assume that the data you’d get would be ‘x’ useful to base for your documents on.